If you don’t know what the above code means, first read chapter 4 of my lecture notes.

The code and data format needed to fit LMMs in Stan

The data

I assume you have a 2×2 repeated measures design with some continuous measure like reading time (rt) data and want to do a main effects and interaction contrast coding. Let’s say your main effects are RCType and dist, and the interaction is coded as int. All these contrast codings are $\pm 1$. If you don’t know what contrast coding is, see these notes and read section 4.3 (although it’s best to read the whole chapter). I am using an excerpt of an example data-set from Husain et al. 2014.

Assume that these data are stored in R as a data-frame with name rDat.

The Stan code

Copy the following Stan code into a text file and save it as the file matrixModel.stan. For continuous data like reading times or EEG, you never need to touch this file again. You will only ever specify the design matrix X and the structure of the data. The rest is all taken care of.